My Decade in Music So Far: Jason Heller

This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.

Screamo went the way of the buffalo somewhere around the time the Used and My Chemical Romance tag-teamed “Under Pressure”. And maybe that’s as it should have been. The year was 2004, and spindly dudes screaming bloody murder over off-brand post-hardcore had somehow insanely gone mainstream in our postmillennial, up-is-down, have-the-terrorists-won? world. There were still a few scattered holdovers from screamo’s 90s heyday, but the pickings were slim for a subgenre of a subgenre that no one had ever pegged themselves as in the first place. “It’s like screaming at a wall/ One day it’s gonna fall”, Ian MacKaye had, well, screamed way back in 1981. Twenty-three years later, the wall had indeed come down. All that seemed to lay behind it was a dead end.

Right around that time, though, a tiny Georgia band called Circle Takes the Square released its debut full-length, As the Roots Undo. Densely layered, harrowingly progressive, and featuring the constrictively laced vocals of Kathy Coppola and Drew Speziale, the album pointed a way forward for screamo, regardless of whether that banner could credibly be taken up again. As it turns out, that unlikelihood is exactly what happened: Before the '00s were put to bed, a slew of new, ravenous, larynx-annihilating post-hardcore bands from Pianos Become the Teeth to Touché Amoré had cropped up (while others, like the relatively stalwart The Saddest Landscape, surged back). But Circle Takes the Square was the scene’s brightest hope for there for a brief flash in the early part of the decade—the problem being, they kind of disappeared after As the Roots Undo, leaving a void in their wake that no other band ever completely filled.

In 2012, though, CTTS went ahead and filled that void themselves. Almost an entire decade after the release of their debut, they issued their second album: Decompositions: Volume Number One. While the specific details about what they’d been up to during that long, album-free break weren’t clear, one thing was for sure: They hadn’t wasted them. Decompositions sounds as though the CTTS had written, recorded, and discarded half a dozen albums since Roots. The evolution is that dramatic. The bones of the band remained—gnawed by time, bleached by the sun, but still there—only now CTTS had found a way to weave pagan-folk ritual, post-rock sprawl, and even black-metal corrosion into its intricately unfolding micro-universe. If Neurosis and Godspeed You! Black Emperor had grown up on Converge and Catharsis, they might have turned out like this.

It’s no surprise that Decompositions evaded most best-of lists for 2012 and 2013; the release was split between those two years, format-wise, and CTTS was never the kind of band to pay attention to the fine art of the self-promotional hustle in the first place. But one full, deep listen to tracks like the album’s astounding eleven-minute closer, “North Star, Inverted”, ought to be enough to at least sway the uninitiated, if not outright convert them. Old-school screamo may have gotten pegged with a reactionary (and even worse) tag, skramz, but Decompositions not only dodges dumb memes and cheap shots, it transcends them entirely. Now: Bring on Volume Number Two, please.

In 2005, Silkworm drummer Mike Dahlquist—along with two other Chicago-area musicians, John Glick and Douglas Meis—was killed in a highway accident when a woman trying to commit vehicular suicide crashed into the car he was in. She wound up surviving and served less than half of her eight-year prison sentence. This year, Dama/Libra released their debut album, Claw. The project is a duo comprising singer-songwriter Joel RL Phelps (Dahlquist’s former bandmate in Silkworm) and multi-instrumentalist G. Stuart Dahlquist (Michael’s brother as well as a former member of Burning Witch, Sunn O))), and others). Together they reached deeply into dark recesses; Claw came out.

It might seem obvious that Claw would evoke the grief of Michael’s death, but it’s nowhere near so literal. Phelps, who had just returned to music after a decade of acute alcoholism, threw himself into the album with a barely contained passion that works at eerie odds with G. Stuart’s ominous, cosmic drones. The entire album is a harrowing experience, but the song “The Chant” is one of the iciest distillations of rage, regret, absence, and heaven-rending frustration committed to record in the past five years. Phelps’ voice takes on the tone of a siren, a throat-singer shifted up into a nerve-pinching pitch; G. Stuart lays down glaciers of synths as if to help his collaborator slip across vast distances of emotional chaos and psychic remove. Claw as a whole is a profound powerful album, but “The Chant” stands alone as a memorial unto itself.

My Music Highlight of the Last Five Years:

I had the chance to see the Replacements when I was a teenager. But as with so many bands I could have seen as a kid, I blew it. Money’s tight when you’re a high-school dropout working a warehouse job, especially when all your spare income goes to obsessively collecting records by bands like, well, The Replacements. Anyway, I figured at the time, I could always catch them the next time they came through Denver. And what do you know, that’s exactly what I did—only “the next time” wound up being a quarter of a century later.

I’m more or less allergic to huge crowds of people, but I choked down my agoraphobia and went to Riot Fest Denver last year, during the middle of the Replacements short string of reunion shows. There were plenty of great bands on the bill, but it was Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson, and crew that tipped me toward attending. I wasn’t going to miss them this time; while I loved The Replacements as a teen, I hadn’t even heard all their classic albums back then—only the ones I’d managed to track down in the handful of used record stores I’d ever been to. Over the years, though, their entire body of music—yes, even their 1990 swansong, All Shook Down—had come to mean a hell of a lot to me. I’d lived with those records, and they’d live in me, for so long, I wasn’t sure how I’d even react to hear them played live. All I knew was, I had to find out.